Artists create opera from whirr and bleeps of drones

The increasing availability and use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, by governments and private citizens is causing anxiety over impacts on security and privacy.

But for a group of Melbourne artists and musicians, the devices have opened up a new world of sonic experimentation.

Visual artist Matthew Sleeth has created music from drones and is presenting this experimental piece of theatre at The Arts House in North Melbourne.

The production, called A Drone Opera, is a sensory assault, with the audience housed in enclosures for their own safety while drones fly overhead and singers Judith Dodsworth, Hamish Gould and Paul Hughes interject with operatic moments.

Mr Sleeth has also brought in Phillip Samartzis who fills the space with a live surround sound design.

Mr Samartzis said the sound design was derived from radio frequency communication and electrical fields.

"I'm just trying to find a correlation to what the actual drones physically do," he said.

"Given that it has an operatic component to it, it was about trying to sit in and among the vocalists.

"It's modern in the sense that you're placing it in an operatic tradition and its history, but nudging it in a very abstract electronic, 21st century sound field of noise and action."

Robin Fox who is usually a sound artist has been employed for this project as a set designer.

"What I tried to do is carve up space with light in almost an architectural sense," Mr Fox said.

"It's almost like something you might have seen in those early terrain generation software programs in the 90s, when virtual reality was promising us all of this software utopia."

The idea of using drones to make art is a fairly new one and an example of the ever unpredictable future of technology's implementation.

"You can actually make the argument that technology doesn't become interesting until it becomes boring, once we start getting past the fetishisation of technology to actually what can it do, why are we using it, who benefits," Mr Sleeth said.

"I think that's almost a more important state to reach."

The piece has taken three years to develop, with government regulations requiring Mr Sleeth to obtain a private pilot's licence and all drone operators to be Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) certified.

"When we first started it really was something that people didn't understand, but I've always been careful that the interesting part of this work can't be the drones, it can't be their novelty, it can't be Top Gear for drones," Mr Sleeth said.

Mr Fox also believes the art should come before the technology.

"I think that's a huge danger with a lot of technology based work, it's really important to keep that element in check, you want to keep that element of play," he said.

"It sometimes leads to that interesting place that ends up as the performance, and becomes something that is powerful for the audience."